A Comparative Study of Children's Stories and Adults' Short Stories Within the Framework of Critical Discourse Analysis

摘要

Critical discourse analysis is an approach toward textual commentary that equips the society with the capacities and understanding which are prerequisites for an effective citizenship in the domain of language. CDA aims to depict those aspects of discourse that are ideologically-loaded and the relations of power that underlie them, which are often unclear to people. CDA shows that major social and political processes have a linguistic-discursive characteristic in part. This follows from the fact that social and political changes in contemporary society include an element of cultural and ideological change. This study was an attempt to uncover the ideological patterns practiced in discourse. It showed how certain discursive features manipulated the representation of certain ideologies in children's and adults' stories, and in which texts (children's or adults') more features were applied. For this purpose, ten children's stories and ten adults' short stories written by different contemporary writers were analyzed on the basis of the socio-semantic features of Van Leeuwen's (1996): suppression vs. backgrounding, nomination vs. categorization, activation vs. passivation, abstraction vs. objectivation, and determination vs. indetermination. The obtained results and percentages were analyzed by the application of chi-square. They showed that there was a significant difference between children's stories compared with adults' short stories in applying the discursive features and that in adults' texts more socio-semantic features were applied.